I believe there will always be a place for live performance art. Of course some kind of future, generative Ai coupled to a high-res VR headset might be able to conjure anything and everything, but I don’t think it likely many people are going to enjoy it. I think humans will always want something they can believe is “real.”
Perhaps I am far too much of a pollyanna about this. I have dedicated my entire adult life to creating live experiences as a performer. On top of that I just spent a year in rural Norway learning to build traditional wooden boats! Granted, anything I have to say is going to be anecdotal, but I think that is why you come to someone like me. If you wanted hard facts and figures you would turn elsewhere. Data I do not have, but I can tell you what my gut says.
There is an essential quality to knowing that the thing in question is happening right in front of you, in the same room. Years ago when I was a teenager my friend Margie told me she had gone to the opera in New York City. This was back when I played violin so my interest in classical music, and thus opera, was a shade more than passing. I balked when she told me how much it cost.
“Why would anyone pay that much to see… opera?” I asked.
“Well, there was nudity,” she replied, “you could see naked people live, but it was classy.” I suddenly found myself developing a hankering for Puccini. Sure, I already had a primordial idea of how to look up naked people on the internet, but the idea of being in the same room, held a kind of magical quality. I think this is also why people go to art galleries to look at famous paintings, even if it’s only to take a selfie to prove they were in the same room.
Walking around my hometown on Halloween night with a friend we passed an enormous line of people that caught our eye. They were not queueing outside a bar or or a club, but rather a sex-toy boutique. While a sudden urge for amorous assistance on Halloween makes a certain degree of sense, it was not the boutique’s products they were interested in, it was a haunted house. These folks wanted to walk inside a building and experience something live. Even when higher quality visuals and atmosphere are doubtless available via a film. (Blue or Otherwise) And yet, people go.
I don’t think it’s just the immersive quality that draws the crowds, I think it is also the crowds themselves. You can see that you are not experiencing this alone. Why else would the rise in lonely at-home viewing over the past three decades also see an attendant rise in online forums and social media geek culture to discuss such things. People don’t just want the art, they want to share their experience of the art.
I think this is also the origin of “smash rooms.” You may have noticed a business like this arriving somewhere in your town. A storefront with a name like “The Rage Room,” promises you can come inside and break stuff. They might have a padded cell where you can throw yourself at the wall, or a pile of crockery that you can bust up with a baseball bat. Why again, would someone want to leave their home to do this? To borrow the popular meme, “We have stuff to break at home.” I don’t believe it is just that at a business where you pay it is someone else’s job to clean it up. I think it has something to do with a more fundamental urge, a desire to do human things near other humans. To be observed in our participation, as much as to participate.
This all comes together nicely in the artform in which I have what you could very charitably call a career. I call it Cabaret, but you might also use Vaudeville, Sideshow, Circus, Muppet Show, or any number of other monikers that conjure a similar vibe. I don’t just play accordion, I juggle, I do magic tricks, I lay on a bed of nails, I perpetrate the occasional striptease. At precisely none of these things am I the best in the world. One need look no further than a single search on youtube in every single one of these categories to find things far more spectacular than myself. So why do people come out to see me?
Obviously I have spent no small amount of time pondering that very question, and what I have arrived at is that people want to know they were in the room where it happened. It is the same reason you continue to pursue and enjoy romantic entanglements with real live human beings even though hotter ones exist online. Some part of your brain might acknowledge that the person in front of you is not as hot as the tightly controlled public image of a given celebrity, but they are here and the celebrity is not. So I guess I come down on the side of the bird in the hand, and not the two in the bush, and I think the vast majority of humanity does as well. Do we fantasize about something bigger, better and faster? Sure, but then we settle down with what is in front of us and go on about the business of living in the real world.
Sure this is all anecdotal, and coloured by what I personally like, but my gut says people will always leave the house to go do something. There is something real to be had out here in the world, and we want to find it and share it with each other. Perhaps not as many as in a previous epoch, but certainly enough for us artists to keep trying to entertain.